Typhus the Killer in the Camps - 2

In a well-written and moving book entitled Civil War Medicine, the author Stewart Brooks wrote:

Surprising perhaps to the layman but not to the student of history, disease was the great killer of the war. As one soldier wrote, "These Big Battles is not as Bad as the fever." Of the Federal dead, roughly three out of five died of disease, and of the Confederates, perhaps two out of three. During the first year, a third of the Union army was on sick call, and probably an even higher figure obtained South. Intestinal infections, such as typhoid and "chronic diarrhea," and "inflammation of the lungs" headed the list. Indeed, diarrhea and dysentery became more vicious as the fighting progressed.¹⁰

A major cause of the high incidence of disease was the failure to take hygiene and sanitation seriously. Prison camps were, of course, terrible but apparently the camps where regular soldiers, i.e. not prisoners, spent months in the field were not that much better.

Brooks gives us the following description of conditions in the camps generally:

In the beginning, and to an unhealthy extent throughout the war, the typical inductee on arriving in camp felt as free as a bird and lived like one. Few recruits bothered to use the slit-trench latrines (and those who did usually forgot to shovel dirt over the feces) and most urinated just outside the tent--and after sundown, in the street. Garbage was everywhere, rats abounded, and dead cats and dogs turned up in the strangest places. The emanations of slaughtered cattle and kitchen offal together with the noxious effluvia from the seething latrines and infested tents produced an olfactory sensation which has yet to be duplicated in the Western Hemisphere.

As for water--and seldom was there enough--any source would do in the early camps. Frequently, it was so muddy and fetid the men held their noses when they drank the stuff. In many instances, the heavy rains washed fecal material directly into the supply with disastrous consequences. However, in time, water came to be regarded generally as a source of disease and attempts were made to secure wholesome supplies. The better outfits even progressed to the point of boiling befouled water--visibly befouled of course.

The United States Sanitary Commission was not long in recognizing these deplorable conditions as a threat to the Cause and dedicated itself to their eradication. By placing the matter squarely before the public and military, it paved the way for the institution of corrective measures relating to sanitation and hygiene. The Commission insisted that the bulk of sickness stemmed from filthy army installations and in no uncertain terms held the regimental brass responsible. Above all, it carried through with its proposals and admonitions via publications and workers and inspectors in the field. Nothing of such force was operative among the Southern armies, nevertheless some improvement was to be noted when conditions permitted. Although the camps tended to improve, it is open to question whether the same can be said of personal hygiene. The shortage of water and soap notwithstanding, this was mainly a case of poor education, carelessness, ignorance or, perhaps more to the point, the rural ways of the time. Among the officers, who usually represented the aristocracy, the rate of sickness ran, one-half that of the enlisted men. Again, the sickness rate for the Western theater--among the men of the frontier--tended to run double that of the Eastern.

The salutary effects of good sanitation and hygiene are severely compromised in the face of poor nutrition, and bad food was the rule. . . .¹¹

It is hardly a surprise that Americans know even less about a foreign war, albeit one in which America had a major role, but where Americans were generally far removed from the areas of greatest misery except at the very end.

Those who moralize about the piles of dead at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau should consider Andersonville where 7,712 men died in six months out of an average of only 19,453 held. The Northern prison camps were also terrible. The "average number" of Confederates held in prisons by the North is 40,815 of whom 18,784 died.¹² Only 252 Confederates held in Northern prisons died from wounds whereas 5,965 died from diarrhea and dysentery.¹³

For the Mexican War (1846-48), the ratio of fatalities from disease to fatalities from wounds is even worse. 1,549 were killed or died from their wounds; 10,951 died of disease.¹⁴

During the Crimean War (1854-56), 12,604 men in the French army died from wounds whereas 59,815 died from sickness. For the English, 4,602 died from wounds whereas 17,225 died from sickness. By contrast, although 35,671 Russians died from wounds, only 37,454 died from sickness.¹⁵

Unfortunately, when war has ended, the misery of disease and its full extent is quickly forgotten. Medals for diarrhea and fever will not inspire new generations of young men to risk their lives for their country.

Diarrhea and dysentery, as well as typhoid, are all spread through contaminated water. Revisionists have generally not been aware of the importance of water contamination except for typhoid. In reality, all three of these diseases are extremely dangerous, especially in wartime when large numbers of people often live in camps with primitive sanitation and water supplies. During peacetime, one can afford the luxury of burial in sealed caskets or perhaps even the kind of watertight "body bags" that were used in the Vietnam War. However, in World War 2 this was a luxury which the Germans could not afford as a rule, even for their own people. As a preventive measure, the cremation of the dead was entirely appropriate to protect against all three of these deadly diseases.

In addition, elaborate water purification measures were employed at Birkenau, for example, where one can still see nine large water treatment tanks within 200 yards of Kremas 2 and 3. The life-saving purpose of these tanks is deliberately misrepresented by the Auschwitz Museum authorities today by a nearby placard stating that these facilities were "intended to produce driving gas from human excrements." The seriousness of any such intent on the part of the Nazis is refuted by the absence of roofs over these tanks either today or during the war as well as by the elaborate internal structures for filtering and settling of solids within the tanks.

The bodies of men who have died or are near death from diarrhea or dysentery do not look any different if they were in a German concentration camp or in a Civil War prison camp or were part of a disease ridden army under Grant or Lee or Napoleon. They are not a pleasant sight. There are, unfortunately, relatively few pictures of sick soldiers from before World War II but they are available if one searches, even for the Civil War, and they are every bit as awful as anything from Bergen-Belsen.

Typhus

Typhus during the Civil War was apparently not the great problem that it has been historically in Europe.

To get some idea as to the historical importance of typhus, one should read Prinzing's Epidemics Resulting from Wars¹⁶ or some of the French or German works of the last century about Napoleon's Russian campaign.

One discussion which is particularly meaningful for this analysis is by Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who accompanied Kurt Gerstein to Belzec and Treblinka in August of 1942. Pfannenstiel was Director of the Institute for Hygiene at the University of Marburg an der Lahn and a major (Obersturmbannfuehrer) in the SS. According to the "Statement of Kurt Gerstein," Pfannenstiel made a speech while in Treblinka in which he said the staff had performed "a great duty, a duty so useful and necessary" and "Looking at the bodies of these Jews one understands the greatness of your good work!"

That Pfannenstiel made a speech complementing the staff at Treblinka is hardly surprising. However, the meaning and content of his speech in Treblinka was probably quite similar, to the speech he gave only a year and a half later in Bremen on January 10, 1944 from which the following is an excerpt.¹⁷

The accounts which we have about the spread of pestilence as a result of the Napoleonic wars are shocking: Because of the massive movements of troops through Germany, because of the quartering of the troops in houses of the civilian population and because of the economic consequences of the continental blockade, the groundwork after 1800 was especially well-prepared for the spread of epidemics. Russian troop masses brought what was at the time called 'war-typhoid'--which included paratyphoid, dysentery and similar diseases, but above all typhus--to Eastern Germany. The French contaminated not only Western Germany but all of Western Europe including Spain with 'war-typhoid.' Even in Sweden there were terrible epidemics. Only England remained untouched by the epidemics because of her position as an island.

The catastrophe which befell the army of Napoleon, which had originally numbered 500,000 men, was completely sealed with pestilence. During the initial advance, in one battle, four-fifths of the men became casualties from disease. In Moscow, which was rich in provisions, the soldiers recovered again. But then, after the burning of Moscow when the 80,000 men of the French army had to return over the infested military roads, they were almost totally wiped out from dysentery, typhoid and typhus. In Smolensk, the number of troops who had to remain behind from typhoid and dysentery rose to 15,000. In Wilna of 30,000 captured French troops, 25,000 had succumbed to disease. Among the civilian population in Wilna at that time, 55,000 fatalities were reported in half a year.

The massing of troops before Leipzig brought new heavy outbreaks of epidemic. A report from Reils to Freiherr vom Stein describes the terrible conditions which arose primarily from the lack of medical care and military hospitals:

Leipzig, October 1813 -- Your Excellency has assigned me to submit an account about my findings regarding the military hospitals for the Allied armies on this side of the Elbe . . . I found approximately 20,000 wounded and sick warriors of all nations in Leipzig. The wildest imagination could not invent so lurid a picture of misery as I found in the reality before me . . . The wounded were lying either in gloomy dens in which amphibians would not have found enough oxygen or in schools with windows which had no glass and in high ceiling churches in which the chill in the air increased proportionally as the foulness diminished . . .
In those places they lie in layers like so many tons of herring, all still in the bloody garments in which they had been carried from the heat of battle. Of the 20,000 wounded not a single one has a shirt, bedsheet, blanket, cover, straw sack or bedstead. . . . Wounded who can not raise themselves to an upright position must discharge feces and urine under themselves and putrefy in their own excrement. For those who can get up, open tubs are available but these overflow on all sides because they are not carried outdoors. In Petri street there was one such tub next to another which was used to deliver the midday soup. This neighborliness between food and human wastes must certainly produce such nausea that it can only be overcome by the fiercest hunger. The most hideous example of this occurred at the clothing market. The loading platform was covered with a row of such overflowing tubs whose stagnant contents were slowly oozing over the steps. It was impossible to bring oneself through this cascade of slops and force oneself to the entrance from the streetside . .

I close my account with the most horrible scene which drove chills through my limbs and shattered my spirit. On the open field of the public school, I found a mountain consisting of garbage and the corpses of my compatriots. There they lay, naked and being eaten by dogs and rats as if they had been lawbreakers and homicidal arsonists.

I appeal to your excellency's humanity and to your love of my king and his people--help our brave ones, help soon, for every wasted minute is an act of murder.

We do not wish to deny that in this war on the enemy's side, for instance, in that hell which we inflicted upon the Poles in the pocket of Kutno, conditions in the Polish emergency hospitals were not very much different.

In all war until the middle of the 19th century, fatalities from disease were on the average six times as high as those inflicted by weapons. It was only in the War of 1870/71 that, for the first time in world history, the number of fatalities from disease was smaller. It was only half the total number killed. In the world war of 1914/18 the fatalities from disease were only one-tenth the number killed by weapons.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6